The present invention relates to a system for encoding image, and more specifically to a method and an apparatus for image compression suited for efficiently storing and retrieving image of large quantity obtained by photographing a three-dimensional body or a scene from many view points.
There has heretofore been proposed technology for compressing dynamic image to compress images of large quantity having high correlations. In the dynamic image, time series data of a large quantity are handled while supressing redundancy between the neighboring frames and redundancy in the frame (which may be a static image) to effect the encoding highly efficiently. An example has been disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 92985/1982.
According to the above prior technology in which the order of decoding complies with the time series, only the variation from a frame of a past moment is encoded to suppress redundancy between the frames. That is, the present frame is estimated from the frame of the past moment, and the estimated error is encoded. In the case of this invention, however, the order or decoding is not definite though the image resembles and the redundancy becomes high as viewed from the neighboring points. It is therefore difficult to fix the image that corresponds to "a frame of a past moment" in the dynamic image, and the system of dynamic image compression cannot be adapted thereto.